MURDER, HE WROTE (PART II OF ??)

FEBRUARY 26, 2023 – Eventually, everyone with a law degree is asked about the accused in some recent, sensational crime, “Do you think he’s guilty [nine times out of 10 it’s a “he”]?” and “How could you defend someone you know is guilty?” These two questions assume that the person with the law degree knows lots about criminal law, which is only one narrow, albeit critical, slice of American jurisprudence.

Before I proceed with my commentary about the “Murdaugh Murders,” I need to qualify myself as a non-expert.

In law school I didn’t go near criminal law except for a mandatory, first-year criminal law procedure class. Tax law didn’t count as criminal law, however much it should have, considering the murderous effect it had on my sanity during deadly boring lectures on special rules intertwined with abstruse exceptions to convoluted exemptions, “subject to the provisions of Section 4.151, subd. 2 (a) through (g), unless prohibited by Section 4.251, subd. 4 (a)(iii).”

Criminal procedure at my school was taught by the inimitable Professor Maynard Pirsig, whose pedagogic method of choice was terroristic application of the Socratic method. He could make you sweat bullets, even if you were one of several innocent “Andersons” in the arc of seats in the first row, and old man Pirsig was aiming his sights at the suspect characters among the “Wagner” through “Zaczinski” section in the top row of the amphitheater classroom. In fact, if Pirsig’s incriminating glare was moving slowly, student-by-student up in that lofty zone of the alphabet, you could bet that in a flash one of the Andersons was about to be implicitly accused of being an idiot. There was no way to know where his figurative gavel would land, except it wouldn’t be where he appeared to be scouting while baiting us with a drawn-out, “Mi-i-i-st-er . . . or . . . Mi-i-i-z-z . . . no . . . Mi-i-i-st-er . . .”

Pirsig was an institution in the academic field of criminal law. Author of many books and scholarly articles, the expert consulted by experts, intimidator of generations of law students, he could’ve been a ready substitute for John Houseman in the starring role of Professor Kingsfield in Paper Chase (for which Houseman won an Academy Award for Best Actor).

Supposedly I was learning at the feet of the master, but if I was actually learning, I’ve long since forgotten whatever it was. Out of curiosity, during the semester I read his son’s best-seller, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and I remember far more of what I learned from that interesting book.

There was one isolated thing I remember clearly from Pirsig’s class, however. The context was a case under analysis that involved a defendant who was accused of indecent exposure. Just before the cops reached the scene of the alleged crime, the accused had jumped into a car. It was nighttime, and one of the cops testified that he, the cop, approached the car and trained his flashlight on the car window next to the seat where the supposed exhibitionist was seated. “And what did you see?” asked the prosecutor. – “I saw a naked man,” answered the cop. (Cont.)

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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson